Original subtitles

Um, last question.

How high a price should one pay to do good in the world?

You talking about risks?

Risk and, you know, ultimate sacrifices.

Those people who travel into the dangerous areas

should do so fully aware that they're taking great risks.

But life is always risks.

The important thing is not to be reckless.

- Up a little more. - There you go. Right there.

To the left a little bit. There you go.

Why did you appoint him? Okay.

Yeah, and was it harder?

Hi. Hi, David.

- Hello, Secretary Clinton. - Hey, who's your helper?

This is Wiley. You've met him a couple of times.

Nice to see you again. How are you doing?

- How are you, my dear? - I'm well. It's nice to see you.

- Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. - A pleasure.

- Thank you for doing this. - My pleasure.

I keep on knocking over lights.

One, two, three, four. You want to tape it?

You guys are ready?

We are now.

Okay, great.

This interview with you is the last one we're doing for the film.

- Oh, my gosh. I'm so flattered. - Isn't that crazy?

- It seems fitting, though. - Oh, thank you.

It does seem fitting.

So sad, but nevertheless fitting.

Top US officials and world leaders

packed the Kennedy Center today

to pay tribute to the late Richard Holbrooke.

With the number of dignitaries in attendance,

that would account for some of this higher security

in the west end of downtown DC.

For me, this whole film really started

when I sat onstage with you and President Clinton

and President Obama and all these other luminaries

and I realized for the first time, I think, really

that my father was a historical figure.

I think that is a recognition

that sometimes comes upon someone gradually.

With Richard, he filled up so much space

and had his own energy field.

People just assumed

that he was a unique figure in their lives

and in the work that they were doing with him.

But taking a step back, which is what you're doing with this film,

you can see the broad impact and the historic significance

of his life and work.

My father died on December 13, 2010,

when his heart gave out.

At the time of his death, he was President Obama's point man

for Afghanistan and Pakistan.

But his career as a diplomat spanned 50 years

of American foreign policy.

By the time I came to know Richard,

his place in history was assured.

But when he began to talk about the importance

of restoring America's place in the world,

it was clear that Richard was not comfortable on the sidelines.

He belonged in the arena.

He wanted to be a great man

so he could change history.

He was and he did.

I believe in history.

I think history is continuous.

It doesn't begin or end on Pearl Harbor Day

or on 9/11.

You have to learn from the past.

Everything everybody said about him here is true.

But in the end what matters is there are a lot of people

walking around on the face of the Earth today

or their children or their grandchildren

because of the way he lived his life.

- What are you gonna call it? - "The Diplomat."

- That's great. - Seems right, right?

Yeah, it does.

My father's life was a public one.

So when he died, I received an overwhelming number

of condolence letters and emails.

One of those notes came from journalist Christiane Amanpour,

who sent me this photo and wrote,

"This is Sarajevo."

New Year's not long ago.

Bright, shining, at peace, and with a future for her children.

"Thank you, Richard."

I had never been to Sarajevo,

the capital of Bosnia and the site of my father's greatest achievement.

I realized that while I read about his many accomplishments,

there was much about his storied career

I didn't understand.

My father's life as a diplomat

constantly pulled him away from our family.

And when we did manage to get together,

he rarely wanted to talk about his work.

Life with Pops, as I called him,

provided a remarkable vantage point.

But he could be an intense and complicated man,

often making our relationship challenging.

As I dealt with this sudden loss,

I decided the only way for me to grieve

was to get to know him better in death

than I did in life.

So I set out into his world.

- Oh, my God. - No kidding, huh?

Thanks for doing this. Appreciate it.

You're the first interview we've done.

You know that I want to.

If there's one word to describe my father?

I would say the diplomatic hope for my generation.

- We're gathered to honor. - Ambassador Dick Holbrooke,

who brought peace to Bosnia.

If you could describe in 25 words or less

your theory of diplomatic persuasion.

You start out by defining your national interest.

You then look at the parties and see what they want

and you find out how you can put it together.

He's admired for his intelligence

and his political savvy,

but "Newsweek" mocked his personal ambition.

I don't understand the ambition issue.

I've never met any successful person in Washington,

or for that matter in television, who didn't have ambition.

Look at that. "New York Times Magazine."

That's crazy.

He had two different covers?

- Two different covers. - Holy Christ.

- Oh, this is about Diane. - This was his old girlfriend.

Did you have these or did you get them just recently?

I found these just as I was going through his stuff.

It's weird, you know, he's always kept these papers.

He always had such a sense of his own history.

This file cabinet as well behind you?

- All of these. Yeah. - All these file cabinets are my father's papers.

This is his...

letters.

These are letters from your father to your mother.

Wow.

"Darling Litty." Weird.

"I left Saigon by beach this morning"

arriving in Soc Trang 0830 with a member of USOM.

It is quite a place to be right now.

Rumor follows rumor,

and now they are sometimes right.

"Incidentally, we really do not know just what is going on in this country."

He left for Vietnam and we corresponded.

He said instead of writing a diary or a journal,

he would write his experiences in letters to me

and I would keep the letters.

"October 25, 1963."

He had a journalist's instinct.

"The tension in Saigon is amazing.

I've never experienced anything quite like it."

There's a lot of reporting,

of recording what the scene is like.

"The country is so sad and I feel it more and more.

I really don't know how I will react to war,

"but it sounds like war there really will be."

You have to remember, this is before

Vietnam is Vietnam.

The beginning was very different from the end.

There are 5,500 Americans in Vietnam.

More than Kennedy wants to be there,

but he sees no alternative.

- Four-star general. - Paul Harkins says

we shall have almost all the American military

phased out of Vietnam by 1965.

We are winning this war.

My father's experience in Vietnam

taught him that what mattered most was having a view from the ground...

...and knowing the right people.

We changed beers.

It's not as good, but it's cold.

In May of 1963,

he and Vlad Lehovich landed in Vietnam

as young Foreign Service officers.

When we arrived, there was a pretty small

American military commitment.

A lot of them were senior people

who weren't that enthusiastic to come here.

The younger folks were.

We thought it was the most exciting place in the world.

"Some things about Vietnam.

I enjoy the drama of the helicopters,

with the air being slapped at by the rotor blades

and driving hard against you.

These scenes, so common to me now,

are still thrilling moments,

"although I would not dare admit it to anyone here."

We formed a little clique.

Your dad was the youngest.

This was to be our war

and the beginning of our careers.

Your father wanted to contribute to the American war effort,

which at the time he believed in.

"September 15, 1963.

As you can see, there's something different about the delta.

I'm fast deciding that's perhaps

"the most supremely unlivable place I've ever seen."

My father was sent to Soc Trang,

a dangerous province in the Mekong Delta

where he was the only American civilian working in the region.

And he thrived.

He was assigned to the pacification program,

an American civilian initiative

to help win the war.

My 22-year-old father worked with the local villagers

building schools and developing agriculture.

Your father very quickly understood

that if you couldn't pacify the country,

in other words, politically mobilize the population,

break it away from the Vietnamese Communists,

produce an economic solution,

no number of soldiers were going to solve the problem.

The Mekong Delta

was the perfect place for him to begin his career.

Rather than being stuck in an embassy

in some junior role that would have driven him crazy,

he was right where the war was happening.

And he saw very early that the senior people in Washington

and maybe in Saigon weren't getting the truth.

He would go out on a helicopter

and see the results of last night's Vietcong raid.

He saw the bodies.

He saw the houses destroyed.

Good to see you again.

Meanwhile, a week later,

Robert McNamara comes on a big tour

and he can see McNamara asking the wrong questions,

getting wishful answers...

...and not wanting to know

what was really happening.

"The information written by one person

in this crazy situation cannot be properly used

by someone 12,000 miles away to arrive at decisions.

Reports lie, ma vieille, they lie.

This was a big part of who he was.

Don't make those kinds of policy decisions

that are driven by lack of connection to reality

and that are wholly ideological.

"I do not know the solution to our present difficulties

in South Vietnam, but I think I do know the nature of the problem now,

and I'm constantly amazed that so many military men

who have been here for many months

"can so miss the facts in front of their eyes."

Dick had absolutely no inhibition

in talking to anybody of any level

in a very blunt way.

Some of it was bravado,

but some of it was doing something that he did very easily

and with remarkably little of the kind of inhibition

that young people usually have.

He wasn't prepared to just be another bureaucrat.

He wanted to understand what was going on,

to meet those who made decisions,

and to be able to influence those decisions.

And so he was in the middle of the action.

He was rubbing shoulders with generals,

figures from Washington,

the great figures who he admired intensely from the American press.

Your father really related to these people,

and they in turn went back home to Washington

and said there's an awfully bright young man out there

named Richard Holbrooke.

Starting first with the republic.

We were in a conference one time

and somebody was bloviating

about the next great project that's gonna win the war.

A large surge in the later part of the period.

And I couldn't understand what it meant.

I walked out and Holbrooke's standing in the doorway

and I said, "What does it mean?"

He says, "It doesn't mean anything."

It wasn't often that you could get some guy

who's supposedly on the team

to tell you that it's a lot of hot air.

"And I remember saying to somebody, "Keep your eye on this guy.

He's gonna be Secretary of State one day."

You know, there's always this thing about his ambition.

Was any of that evident to you as a little brother?

This guy, for instance.

Was this guy ambitious?

You know, he wrote an autobiography when he was 14.

At the end, he writes,

"Most people write their autobiographies

after they're famous.

I'm writing mine before I'm famous."

You know, I look at these pictures. I love this one.

Look at him. It's great.

He wants to make sure he's in the picture.

- He does. - Doesn't he?

I love that you're sitting in your father's lap

while he holds the cigarette.

- What was he like? - Incredibly - nice person.

He was a doctor.

You know, he actually wanted Dick to be a physicist,

and used to always say to him that he expected him

to win the Nobel in physics.

When did he start to get sick?

Do you remember?

Well, my father was sick with cancer

for seven years before he died.

"Dear Dad, I hope you're feeling fine.

I assume by now you're about perfect again."

He died in '57?

Mm-hmm. He had just turned 43.

He talked very little about his father,

which I think had to have been

the most formative experience.

- My parents met at Brown. - University on a blind date.

He was a good student.

I was the better student.

He was interested in two fields...

Diplomacy or journalism.

He went to work for the "Brown Daily Herald."

And in 1960, he convinced the paper to send him to Paris

to cover a peace conference between America,

Russia, Britain, and France.

It was shut down after a few days

and legendary "New York Times" man James Reston

told my disappointed 19-year-old father,

"Whether you go into journalism or the Foreign Service,"

you will always be able to say, 'I started my career

"at the worst diplomatic fiasco ever held.'"

The "Times" did not offer him a job.

And the State Department,

the Foreign Service, did offer him a job.

So that was an easy decision.

"October 11, 1962.

Remember, what is true in foreign policy

is also in this case true in love.

"Inaction, inactivity is as much an action as action itself."

I got on a plane one day

and arrived in Vietnam.

We decided we still loved each other.

We wanted to get married.

My parents were married in Saigon

in a civil ceremony,

but lived there for less than a year before my mother moved to Bangkok.

They decided to evacuate all the American dependents.

That's in February of '65,

by which time I was pregnant with you.

So funny to see him doing fatherly things.

Actually feeding me. And that just seems weird.

"Darling Litty, I'm afraid you may not be getting"

such a good deal as you think.

It might be a life with a guy

who just can't be home on time for dinner every night

and who does sort of unexpected things,

and who sometimes won't pay attention when he should,

and other times gets all tangled up in some point

which is not of any interest to you.

"And sometimes is just inconsiderate."

In the summer of 1966,

a young family moved to Washington, DC,

and my father went to work in the White House

focusing once again on pacification.

And your father passionately believed

that pacification was A, necessary,

and B, being done absolutely the wrong way.

"November 1966, returned to Vietnam

after an absence of five months.

I was first struck by how little things have changed."

"All emphasized the glacial pace

at which real events happen in Vietnam

"as opposed to the wild fluctuations in mood that grip the US government."

I mean, that's vintage Holbrooke.

- Yeah. - It's just so trenchant.

It's well-written. It's saying things

that Foreign Service officers are not supposed to say.

He's taking a dig at the entire US government

at the age of 25.

And this is going to the White House.

A question still hangs over us, never quite answered.

What did it all mean?

Behind the continued debate

about whether the war could have been won,

a debate that will never be resolved,

lies another question of even greater importance...

What are the lessons of Vietnam?

I'll endeavor to offer a brief personal answer to my own question.

As they say, the following does not necessarily

represent the views of the US government.

There was nothing wrong with our cause in Vietnam.

Those of us who signed up or were sent there

did not question our goal,

but sometimes even the world's greatest power

can't achieve its goal.

When we send our young men and women

overseas to fight for their country,

we must be sure they're really fighting

for our vital national security interests.

And so we failed the first test.

Our beloved nation sent into battle

soldiers without a clear determination of what they could accomplish

and they misjudged the stakes.

Success was not achievable.

He learned the need to establish some relationship

between our military objectives and our political objectives.

He wasn't opposed to the use of military force,

but he was opposed to the use of military force

to which you couldn't assign a political purpose.

So he became convinced

that the war had to be ended.

When President Johnson decided to try to end the war

by negotiating with the North Vietnamese,

my father secured a spot on the American delegation

and my family moved again.

In Paris, the politicians

have been talking about ending a war, the Vietnam War.

He was sitting there

as the president was sending negotiating instructions

to our team of negotiators

including the most famous Americans of his age,

living and working side by side with these people

who had a real sense of history.

But there was always a restlessness about your father,

no one thing trapped his mind

and kept it focused.

The truth of the matter is,

the Paris peace talks have achieved nothing.

The delegates still turn up,

make accusatory speeches, and leave.

Is this really what he wants to do all his life?

And in the meantime, the war goes on

and the casualty lists mount.

The conventional career ladder wasn't for him.

In 1969, he got a fellowship at Princeton

and my brother Anthony was born.

A year later, he was named head of the Peace Corps in Morocco.

He's always described as supremely ambitious.

Was that clear throughout your marriage to him?

- Yes. - What was he like as a husband?

Absent a lot.

He changed, I think, after he divorced your mother.

In what way?

I think he got more and more

self-absorbed.

I went to his first TV interview.

It was in Washington for a local station.

Some woman came up to him after we walked out

and asked him for his autograph.

And I remember distinctly he looked so happy

and so pleased with himself.

You got a sense of a mind recognizing

that there were bigger things ahead.

I met him during impeachment summer of 1974.

Your dad was, like, legendary to me at that point.

He was Holbrooke.

Wait, he's 33 years old.

How in the world can he be legendary at that point?

- What had he done? - That's a very good question.

But he had size.

When people talked about him

they would say, "Did you see what Holbrooke did?

Did you see what Holbrooke said?"

- Early on in the 1976 - election,

he joined Jimmy Carter's campaign,

which led to a senior job in the administration.

- He was the youngest Assistant. - Secretary of State

in American history.

He was well known as this kind of

dashing diplomat in the State Department.

We met for three and a half hours this morning.

And he was known as kind of a loose cannon.

There was a lot of broken china along the way.

He was impatient. He irritated people.

And he stepped on a lot of toes.

And he was right about a stunning amount of stuff.

He could do a level of analytics

around big things and small

which no one else did.

There's nothing on Earth

like vitality.

Every time he walked in a room,

it would be more questions,

more energy for the answers.

We would enter the room in the middle of a dialogue

and exit in a different dialogue.

When we would travel, he would have friends within two minutes.

It would be the guy who was selling the buns

on the street would be his friend.

He would find a joke in any language.

Was that because he wanted to connect with these people?

Or was it innate curiosity as well?

Maybe he was creating families.

- No, I've felt that for myself... - You think?

...that there was that sense of creating a family around him

because he was always on the go.

How angry were you at him?

How much of your life?

Frustrated more than anger.

But I don't think I have that rage.

And I think I realized I had to figure it out without him.

- And for me it was... - Did you tell him?

Probably not.

I don't think I was that self-aware.

I just think I was trying to muddle through in a way.

But when I had my own children,

when I had my kids who wanted to see their famous grandfather,

wanted to get a sense of that,

and he didn't have the time

or the energy or the ability, that...

That frustrated me more.

Talking about George Bush.

President Bush.

In fact, I've been with him in Germany.

He... George Bush, Sr., for example,

is going to Berlin July 4 of this year.

What's up, Cyrus?

- Ah! Hi, buddy. How you doing? - Good.

Yeah, this is my studio, which I've fixed up.

- It looks great. - This is Dad's book.

You remember, Dad had enough copies to build the Berlin Wall.

You open the closet and it's bricked in, the wall.

- Copies of the book. - It was just Dad's book.

How'd he sign it?

"Ambassador Dad."

Ambassador Dad.

Ambassador Dad.

The most interesting things I've learned

about Dad's work were things I learned

from sitting quietly while he talked to other people.

He never considered it worth his time to tell me...

- Just me, just me... - Sure.

...a story when he could tell that story to a wider audience.

It was about him so much of the time.

But let's be honest, it was more interesting.

His life was often more interesting than mine.

Who's not gonna come meet Nelson Mandela?

Go hang out till 2:00 A.M. with Will Ferrell?

Yeah, I'm going.

Willie Nelson's tour bus when he did the Colbert thing?

Yeah, going into Willie Nelson's tour bus

and do a bong hit with Willie Nelson.

Dad goes and sings on "The Colbert Report"

something about ice cream.

We need some spoons, I think.

- Spoons? - Yeah, spoons.

All negotiators carry their own spoons.

My father traveled to more

than 180 countries in his lifetime.

And every few years he'd take us with him.

In 1993, we went to a remote region of Tibet...

Only the eighth, ninth, and tenth Westerners to visit.

He was thrilled to share this adventure with us,

but also had another reason to get far away from home.

It was six months into Bill Clinton's presidency,

yet my father still had not been offered a role in the administration,

and the constant speculation was enormously frustrating.

I remember going through real anguish with him

after Clinton was elected

and your dad was kind of shoved off to the side.

There was always too much opposition

to him for any senior job.

It was never that people disputed.

Dick Holbrooke's abilities.

The issue was what trouble would he cause.

Les Gelb and I, in our eminent wisdom,

were telling him just drop out.

Don't let yourself be humiliated.

He wouldn't do it. And he was smarter than both of us

because all he knew was he had to get in there

and then his ability would lead the rest of the way.

Welcome to "Today" on a...

Not long after we returned from Tibet,

I became a producer at the "Today" show,

and my first week on the job, my father was a guest.

On "Close-Up" this morning, Germany.

The new US ambassador there, Richard Holbrooke.

- Today marks his first official day on the job. - Hi, Bryant.

Your appointment must have had some special significance for your mother.

Well, it did. She was born in Germany.

My grandfather served in the First World War

for the Kaiser and even won the Iron Cross.

My mother was brought up in Hamburg

and left with her family in 1933.

My father had read the book "Mein Kampf."

And one month after Hitler was elected,

he decided to get away from Europe

and we went to Argentina.

The family was Jewish.

Absolutely, but my father wasn't very religious.

Not at all, actually.

When she was 18, my grandmother Trudi

left Argentina for America.

Trudi, Dick's mother, was very forward-looking.

They wanted to be modern.

They wanted to be American.

And the Jewish background

was just one of those things of the Old World.

She and Dick's father said we're gonna leave all this behind us.

That's nothing but trouble.

- Little more than a year after. - Dick went to Germany,

I asked him to come home and be Assistant Secretary of State for Europe.

The whole idea was to make

this newly free Europe after the Cold War

united, democratic, and peaceful.

And the Balkans were the big obstacle there.

In 1984, Sarajevo hosted the Winter Olympics.

Eight years later, the city was at the center

of a horrific civil war and under siege.

- Roger. - David!

- Hey, welcome back. - Hey, man, how are you?

Roger Cohen was the Sarajevo bureau chief

for "The New York Times" during the war.

Yeah, all this was completely destroyed before.

When was the last time you were here?

Well, it's amazing to me.

I haven't been here for 16 years.

I mean, this place haunted me.

I just couldn't come back here.

- This was all destroyed? - Oh, no, this was just completely destroyed.

This was a wasteland.

There were the shells of apartment buildings.

There were people living in them

and they were, like, raising rabbits, you know, to eat.

Their kids were bicycling around manically between the rooms

because they couldn't go outside.

Now we're emerging onto what was known as Sniper Alley.

The Serbs were in Grabovica here to the right

and there were certain cross streets where they had a clean shot.

You would just get onto this stretch and you would just go.

This is where my father would stay when he came to town, right?

Yeah, yeah.

He hated being just in the diplomatic bubble.

That's why he would, whenever he could,

you know, he would try to mingle, try to get a sense

of what people were feeling, what people were thinking.

He did not believe in sitting in an office

in Washington and pontificating.

And he didn't think you could understand Bosnia without coming here.

Not for a moment.

Two years before my father

was appointed as Assistant Secretary,

he had traveled to Bosnia as a private citizen.

He saw the war in its early stages

and wrote about it in his journal.

"We are going blind into a war zone."

A moment ago we heard machine-gun fire

"and smoke is rising in the near distance."

"The town just ahead of us has life in it,"

but an air of tension. Little sound.

"No one raises their voices."

At a time where most people were trying

to hightail it away from Bosnia,

he traveled to the Balkans.

That was certainly the most brutal year

Europe had seen since the Holocaust.

There were actual concentration camps and rape camps

that had been established where simply on the grounds of ethnicity

or religion folks were rounded up in the hundreds,

in the thousands, and systematically brutalized.

The issue seemed from here was pretty simple.

Yugoslavia had broken up.

The Serbs reckoned that Bosnia belonged to them.

They drove out 750,000 Muslims

in the first few months of the war.

And they killed them pretty systematically.

So far it's a victory for the Serbs

under the charismatic leader Slobodan Milosevic.

Milosevic was a high-powered young Communist.

He was very, very smart.

And he was ruthless in getting what he wanted.

- Greater Serbia. - Yeah.

He was like a Hitler.

It was savage.

And the civilians were targets.

And all hoped, including myself,

that this would stop.

And then it didn't stop.

People here are beginning to wonder

whether anybody out there really cares anymore.

Imagine what it was like to be seeing this

and people just were ready to let it carry on.

The mantra of the world

was that this is centuries of ethnic hatred.

We can't do anything about it.

- And that was bullshit. - Complete, yeah.

Because for decades these people had lived together.

And it wasn't a civil war. It was a genocide.

Mr. President, do you not think

that the constant flip-flops of your administration

on the issue of Bosnia sets a very dangerous precedent?

There have been no constant flip-flops, madam.

"There have been no constant flip-flops, madam."

Ooh, baby. I just pissed off the President of the United States.

I didn't really mean to, but I'd been listening

to this sort of litany of how great the Clinton administration

had been doing in Bosnia and I'm like, "Really?"

I was up at the United Nations

and I saw more diplomats

from more countries than any other American diplomat.

And they would come up to me all the time

saying, "Why aren't you people doing something?"

And I'm sad to say that at the beginning

the Clinton administration was slow on this.

As soon as my father was sworn in,

he was pushing for more aggressive American policy on Bosnia.

There are times when the use of force

or the willingness to threaten credibly

the use of force is unavoidable.

In Bosnia,

confronted by a small group of Bosnian-Serbs...

Not all the Serbs, but a small group of Bosnian-Serbs

who are evil people, genuinely evil...

Confronting true evil,

you had to be able to stand up to it.

The phrase was diplomacy backed by force.

I can remember lots of calls from Dick saying,

"We have to refine the exact terms

those sons of bitches need to sign up to

or we're gonna whack them."

Richard understood the only thing

that was going to change the absence of a balance of power

on the ground was military force.

But he couldn't snap his fingers and send the air force in.

If use of force was inevitable,

the Serbs were the perfect adversaries.

Those guys helped make the case.

This is the tragedy of Srebrenica,

now overrun by Bosnian-Serb forces.

By the summer of 1995,

Muslims basically were driven into three safe areas

that had been declared around Bosnia.

The largest one was the town of Srebrenica.

The Serbs attacked Srebrenica

and 10-15,000 men tried to walk through

basically 20 miles of Serb territory.

The first group of refugees

expelled from Srebrenica

arrived in Bosnian government territory early this morning.

Hundreds of refugees are arriving in Tuzla every hour.

I was working for the International Rescue Committee in Tuzla.

And it wasn't clear what was happening,

but Srebrenica was being overrun.

International attention has now turned

on the fate of thousands of Srebrenica's men.

We definitely got some of the first stories

as the refugees emerged from the forest.

And we were feeding this information back to our bosses.

And Dad is essentially in on the phone call.

- You're calling in as part of your team... - Yeah.

- ...and telling him what you're seeing? - Yeah.

"Have you seen my son?", pleads this mother.

"He was wounded and then they took him away."

After these long days, we would go back to the hotel

and basically scream at everyone we could back in America

and tell them, "You have to do something."

- Including our father? - Including our father, yeah, yeah.

"I remember what he said. He said, "I'm doing all I can, God damn it.

My paper is on the president's desk."

I remember a very intense

and emotional meeting in the Oval Office

in the aftermath of Srebrenica.

There was a picture on the front page that morning

of a 20-year-old woman who had hanged herself

after a mass rape.

And at breakfast that morning,

my oldest daughter Karenna

confronted me and said,

"What can we do about this?

Why are we allowing this to continue?"

8,000 Muslims had been gunned down in cold blood.

And I think something snapped at that point,

and at that point you say to yourself,

"Okay, we've got to take a gamble."

And what's the best gamble around?

What's our trump card?

Dick Holbrooke, you know?

"In early August, the president decided

I would begin a last-ditch, all-out negotiating effort.

The president was saying this is it,

"the real and perhaps last American push for peace."

He immediately felt

that he was a man that didn't have a script.

He had an idea.

His idea was he was gonna stop this war.

But how it was gonna happen,

what cards we would have to play,

how he would do it,

that was not a script that had been written.

When Dick arrived, we would talk.

"So what's the game plan?"

That was the whole thing

is that he had to create the game plan.

There is no game plan for something like this.

Mr. President.

When we first started,

we went to see President Tudjman.

Mr. President.

That looked easy.

We flew to Belgrade

and we were whisked in to meet Slobodan Milosevic.

Then we had to go and see Izetbegovic.

So we had to get to Sarajevo.

There was a discussion about how would we get there

and could Milosevic assure us safe passage

because Sarajevo was surrounded.

But Milosevic said, "I cannot guarantee your safety."

We're going to Sarajevo through Zagreb later today

and we have nothing to say on the talks.

So we decided we would drive over Mt. Igman

from Croatia.

My father and General Clark

got into an American Humvee

and the rest of of his team followed behind

in a hulking French armored personnel carrier.

"The Mt. Igman road was often described"

as the most dangerous road in Europe.

The roadbed itself had little foundation

"and no reinforcement along either side."

What's it feel like to come up this road again?

Will always bear the stigma of tragedy for me.

Our family was on vacation in Wyoming

and I came in off the golf course and got a call from Richard

saying that he and Wes Clark were on the phone,

and they told me what happened on the Mt. Igman road.

And I was heartsick.

The French armored personnel carrier

slipped over the edge and plunged several hundred yards into a ravine

where it detonated two land mines and caught fire.

The vehicle probably rolled

side over side maybe 25 or 30 times.

And then it caught fire and blew up.

Three brave, brilliant, fine Americans,

career government officials

who were devoting their lives to the cause of peace

in this part of the world, have died in this accident.

I remember when my father called that day

and he was very upset

and he said, "I'm okay, but it's been horrible."

These three people mattered.

We will miss them unbelievably.

The country realized that what we were doing was important

and we had to succeed.

It also reminded people that, you know,

it isn't just soldiers in battle who are in danger,

that diplomacy in dangerous areas is inherently risky.

I'm going back to Paris

with our reconstituted team tonight.

If this peace initiative does not get moving,

one way or another, NATO will be heavily involved

and the Serbs don't want that.

- "As I woke up, - I turned on CNN

and heard terrible news."

- The timing was deliberate. - It always is.

"A Bosnian-Serb mortar shell had killed

at least 35 people in a marketplace in Sarajevo."

The busiest hour of the day

in the busiest place.

"Watching the small screen fill with scenes

of new carnage, I wondered if this was a deliberate response

to my public warnings the day before.

And the key question...

"What would we do in response?"

As Sarajevo slept,

NATO warplanes began the bombardment.

The city skyline became silhouetted

against the relentless explosions of missiles

finding their targets with unerring accuracy.

If anyone doubts the resolve

of NATO and the United States,

they should only look at what happened last week.

He knew that he had to say to the Serbs, "Enough."

And I remember once he was going to Belgrade

to see Milosevic.

We look forward today

to important and productive talks with President Milosevic.

And the bombing was supposed to resume the next day.

And he thought to himself, "Should we stop the bombing?

'Cause I'm gonna see him. Will this send the wrong signal?"

And then he thought, "No, the signal we must send

is this is not gonna stop.

I'm coming to see you. I'm gonna hit you at the same time.

See how you like that."

That's having the balls to say to the guy

who'd been the strongman of the Balkans,

"You finally met somebody just as tough as you."

You're gonna have dinner tonight in Belgrade with President Milosevic.

- Do you trust him? - My job isn't to trust.

My job is to negotiate.

One time he called me from Milosevic's office.

"Hey, man, I mentioned to Slobo

that you're a big Cuban cigar smoker.

And I asked him if he would give you some.

He said he would send you a box.

But I wouldn't believe him

"because he lies all the time anyway."

Then he said to him, "Don't you lie all the time, Slobo?"

The one time I had lunch with Milosevic,

I thought he had the coldest eyes I'd ever seen

and I was glad that Holbrooke was there

to try to bring him around.

Day three of Richard Holbrooke's latest Balkan shuttle,

his third capital in as many days.

The grinding work

of being the action officer for stopping a war

is brutal.

We're going to go to Zagreb and see President Tudjman.

We're going to go to NATO.

We have to get to Rome tonight

- and we're on a very tight schedule. - It was pretty tough.

We have to go see President Izetbegovic.

We got a very tight time schedule.

You might sleep on the aircraft for 10 minutes.

We're very tired. That's a short statement.

People were keyed up for it.

All the real issues are finally being negotiated

for the first time in 16 months.

When he showed up, it changed the story completely.

We're talking about the map, about constitutional issues,

about economic reconstruction.

It just gave so much heft,

and then the intellectual brilliance of being able to push this through.

Of course we are making progress.

I think we've made a little progress.

Milosevic realized he could not prevail.

Thank you. I will report to President Clinton.

That we were not going to permit it

and we weren't going to allow him to continue to kill people at random.

I'm pleased to announce that the parties in Bosnia

have agreed to a cease-fire.

And that's basically what got us to Dayton.

The most unlikely location to make peace

from the most savage of wars.

A bleak air force base in Dayton, Ohio.

The idea to take these guys

out of this poisonous well of history into America,

that was genius.

This war was all about a terrible, poisonous past,

and no country rids people of their past

and allows them to begin anew

as much as the United States does.

If Dayton

and the peace process do not succeed,

the country will slip back into war.

There was tremendous pressure on him.

He was in the hot seat. There was no daylight

between him and what he was trying to accomplish.

The most bitter of enemies

will sit down with negotiators

to try to bury their differences

as they have their dead.

I think by then your dad had traction,

and that's a fearsome sight, Holbrooke with traction.

Did you think going into Dayton that it was going to work?

Not really.

The setting of this dinner was so spectacular.

It certainly demonstrated that the US

was not a country to be trifled with.

Typical of Richard, it was a piece of theater.

He told me very directly,

"Kati, you have to make Milosevic and Izetbegovic talk to each other."

This was my first diplomatic assignment from my new husband.

But much of the evening, they were each looking in a different direction.

Toward the end of the dinner, as a desperate woman,

I said, "How did this war start?"

And Milosevic said,

"Mm, I didn't expect it to be so long."

And at that point Izetbegovic piped in with,

"Me neither."

And then they started talking.

By the end of dessert, they were calling each other.

Slobodan and Alija.

Milosevic and the Serbs had been the aggressors

throughout the war,

yet Alija Izetbegovic, the founder and president of Bosnia,

had made recent gains in the battlefield

and was deeply conflicted about making peace.

What is your sense

of how your father felt about my father?

I understood that.

- "Day three, Friday, - November 3.

A new problem arose.

An intrepid young 'Christian Science Monitor' journalist David Rohde

had set out for Srebrenica

"hoping to write a follow-up account of its fall."

Srebrenica had kind of fallen off the map

and I was specifically frustrated, to be honest, with your father

'cause he stopped talking about this atrocity

which I thought was even bigger than I had reported.

On October 29,

showing more courage than wisdom,

he began digging near the presumed site of a mass grave.

I had been in once, found them, gotten out,

and reported the story,

and I decided to go in a second time.

Big mistake.

Not surprisingly,

he was picked up by Bosnian-Serb police.

As Dayton opened, he was missing.

I gave the Serbs a bargaining chip

because they had me and they accused me of being a spy

and they insisted they weren't going to let me go.

"I told Milosevic that while we would continue

to discuss the issues, no agreement would be possible

"at Dayton unless Rohde was found unharmed."

To my amazement and embarrassment,

he told Milosevic he was gonna stop the talks.

That he personally was responsible

for the safety of David Rohde.

"Milosevic was astonished.

'You would do all this for a journalist?'"

- The correspondent for. - "The Christian Science Monitor"

was greeted warmly by diplomats.

It worked. I'm here today because of your dad.

- Saturday, - November 18, 1995.

Negotiations have a certain pathology.

A kind of life cycle

almost like living organisms.

At a certain point, which one might not recognize until later,

the focus and momentum needed to get an agreement

can disappear.

Something can happen to break our single-minded commitment.

We worried that if we were still at Wright-Patterson

over the Thanksgiving holiday,

only a few days away,

it would create the impression we had stayed too long

and accomplished too little.

- I remember at one point. - Milosevic

was worried whether Dick had the right fortitude.

And he came up to him and in this heavily accented English

"he said," Question is,

Richard Charles Albert Holbrooke,

"do you have balls to finish this deal?"

- He said that to my father? - Yes.

And I was standing there and I looked over at Dick

and Dick didn't answer, but, boy, did he take it on board.

After 20 days, the talks were faltering.

The obstacle to an agreement was Izetbegovic

and the Bosnians, who remained reluctant to make peace.

Your dad, thinking that we needed a visual

to convince Izetbegovic,

created this sort of poster-sized board

on all the gains that the Bosniaks had gotten.

Izetbegovic kind of shrugged

and the thing gets left on the side of a couch.

But apparently it was left in such a way

that any visitor coming next

could see what it was on the side of the couch there.

Milosevic turned out to be the next visitor to see Izetbegovic,

he happened to look over there and he said,

"Wait a minute."

Milosevic saw the poster and was furious.

55% of the land was being given to Bosnia and Croatia,

which violated a key principle of the talks.

The split was supposed to be 51-49.

The map had to be redrawn.

Chris Hill and your father

were running back and forth in these negotiations.

He would run up and down the hall saying,

"He's just agreed. No, he said he's not agreeing."

And then we had the Croats.

Keeping them on board was important.

I came to the American parlor.

And your father had in a hand

champagne

and told me

we finished negotiations.

I told him, "Richard,

I want to see the map."

The map was terrible.

The problem was as the Bosnians fixed the map,

they gave historic Croatian land to the Serbs

rather than their own land, and that was never going to fly.

I refused. I refused.

Finally tonight,

the US negotiators gave all of the parties that deadline...

Finish this tonight or else pack up and go home.

Tudjman insisted that Izetbegovic

put some land on the table, too,

and Izetbegovic would not accept the deal.

"Sometimes Izetbegovic seems to want revenge more than peace,

but he can't have both."

The Serbs committed terrible crimes

and they were going to be rewarded for it.

The absence of justice.

That kills you, really.

The Bosnian peace talks in Ohio collapsed overnight.

Three weeks after their first handshakes,

the bitter enemies were locked in nonstop arguments.

The United States has already told the Balkan delegations

the talks will end in a few hours.

"Time had run out.

We had to see Izetbegovic.

'There are 700 journalists waiting outside the base, '

"I said, and we needed an answer immediately."

Izetbegovic was a man under pressure.

He was carrying alone

the weight for the survival of his people and his nation.

"There was a long, agonizing pause.

We watched Izetbegovic carefully.

No one spoke.

Finally, speaking slowly,

Izetbegovic said, 'It is not a just peace,

"but my people need peace.'"

- To people who doubted. - American leadership,

they saw it once again in Dayton.

To people who doubted the American commitment to human rights,

they saw it in Dayton.

And I am personally very proud to have been part of it.

- I remember the first time. - I came back here after Dayton.

The first US troops were arriving.

And I got in my jeep and I drove out

of this city I loved and hated,

and I just drove straight out of town past the airport.

People were clearing away roadblocks.

I couldn't believe it.

It's a tough peace, but it's a peace.

Four years of hellish war.

The three presidents agreed to an astonishingly comprehensive plan.

It's a hell of a job.

I think people ought to take a moment and say,

"This is something really historic."

I really do not know

that any other political

or diplomatic figure at the time could have done this.

The attempt to destroy Bosnia

was over.

But Milosevic was still in power.

And by 1998 he had turned his malevolent attention

to another country in the region.

In 1998 you called him back to help with Kosovo.

Someone told me it was like Holbrooke-Milosevic round two.

That's exactly what it was.

After my trip to Bosnia,

I drove to a small town in Kosovo.

More than anywhere I went, I can see the result of my father's work.

Armed and ready, these villagers in Kosovo

have been preparing for a civil war in which they would fight

for their independence from Serbia.

These men were fighting the Serbs

when my father came to see them in this farmhouse,

a visit that changed the course of the war.

This is an attempt to find out what is going on inside.

Oh, my goodness. Wow, look at that.

Today, they consider my father a hero.

Your father and his father.

That's your father?

Because three years after Dayton...

After exactly 11 weeks of bombing,

the Serbs will lose all control over Kosovo.

...Milosevic's reign of terror was over.

Anyone who has a chance to do something

which results in lives that are not destroyed,

refugees are allowed to return,

and a tremendously dangerous situation is brought under control

can feel pretty good about it.

Richard Holbrooke has just authored the book.

"To End a War."

He left the government and wrote

a best-selling account of his diplomatic success in the Balkans,

which was optioned to make into a film.

Remember he had this great line about who he wanted to play him?

Yes, Denzel Washington.

He returned to Wall Street

where he had worked in the '80s

and enjoyed his new level of celebrity.

Your father was larger than life in so many respects.

People have thousands of Holbrooke stories.

Hillary would rather tell stories

about traveling with Holbrooke

than relive all of our most important family reunions.

He just was so intent upon making his case.

And I'd push open the door to the ladies' room

and he follows me in and we're in Pakistan.

I turn around and say, "Richard, do you know where you are?"

He looks around and says, "Oh, my. Oh, my."

He was frustrating

at the same time that he was endearing.

But with all the chaos,

all the attention somewhere else,

I never once had any reason to doubt

the total commitment of his friendship.

He was a genius at friendship.

You talked about being a great friend.

Did you guys ever talk about being a father?

Uh, yeah. Sure.

What did he say?

Well...

you asked.

Uh, you know, he wished he'd been a better father.

Yeah, I think he did.

I'm not sure he knew how to do that.

When I was about eight years old,

my parents took me to a striking new complex

that had recently been built in New York.

These buildings, my father said,

would become the most important in the world.

They would prevent future wars.

By now he's done Germany,

the European desk at the State Department,

Bosnia, and Kosovo.

And I thought he needed a new challenge.

So I asked him to go to the UN.

My father did not live to see how his dream

for the UN dissolved in the face of the harsh realities of the Cold War

and the inadequacies of the UN system itself.

But I never forgot the initial visit

and my father's noble if overly idealistic dream.

Excuse me. I'm sorry.

Despite its many problems and failures,

I still believe in the importance,

indeed, the necessity of the United Nations.

The UN job brought him back to New York,

which was his favorite city in the world,

and he made the ambassador's residence a high-powered hot spot.

He used the social platform to the max.

We'd lie on the bed like two generals

moving armies around a map.

Only instead of armies, they were people around a table

because Richard believed that the key to a successful dinner

was in the seating.

It was very important that Nelson Mandela

always have movie stars around 'cause he got a kick out of that.

And that Robert De Niro had somebody talkative next to him

because he's not a talker.

Do you think about him a lot in this job?

I think about him, I would say, most days.

Your father recognized that we do carry

inordinate responsibilities as the leading superpower,

and that often the United Nations went places so we wouldn't have to.

And so it is uniquely in the United States' interests

to try to get the most out of this flawed body.

Eventually he got the US to pay its bills.

The security council took on HIV/AIDS.

And it was Richard.

He changed the dynamics.

He placed it right in the center

of UN discussions.

My father loved being at the United Nations,

but ever since high school, there was another job he coveted.

How close was he to becoming your Secretary of State in 1996?

Well, I never considered appointing anybody but him or Madeleine.

President Clinton said he had two choices

for Secretary of State... My father or you, of course.

Did you ever feel he was a rival or vice versa?

Well, I didn't look at him as a rival,

but I was Secretary of State.

I've always wanted to ask you this, Mr. Vice President.

If you had won in 2000, would he have been your Secretary of State?

- Well... - I want to know.

I will say most people were justified

in believing that he was first in line.

What do you think it was that he never got this job that he really wanted?

He was so close so many times, it seems, in a way.

I can empathize.

If you had been elected, would he have been your Secretary of State?

Well, I can't imagine anybody else.

In fact, when President Obama said, "I want you to be Secretary of State,"

I said, "Oh, no, no, no. What about Richard Holbrooke?"

Two days after the 2008 election,

my father did interview for the job with President-elect Obama.

It was a 30-minute meeting.

He went in there and he did his thing.

Including saying to Obama, who greeted him as Dick,

saying back to him, "Would you please call me Richard?

It's very important to my wife."

He said, "My wife Kati feels so strongly

that people call me Richard."

And, I mean, like, the president can kind of call you...

- Whatever the hell he wants. - ...whatever the hell he wants, right?

He told me that and I said, "That's a joke, right?"

You didn't really say that?

I said, yeah, you didn't really say...

He says, "Oh, yeah, I did."

And Obama, by the way, told others about that.

Once again my father did not appear to have a job

with the incoming Democratic administration.

So he did what he had done before

and got away from Washington,

joining my family and me in Telluride, Colorado,

our favorite place to be together.

Yeah!

You got that with the cap off

because, I'm sorry, but I'm only doing that once today.

There's no second take.

He was funny and warm.

What do you hope for 2009?

That Kitty

gets as tall

as you.

- Okay. - But that will never happen.

It was both our best

and last time together in Telluride.

A few weeks later, he accepted a job

in the Obama administration.

I next have the great personal pleasure

of introducing the special representative

for Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Ambassador Holbrooke will coordinate across the entire government

an effort to achieve United States' strategic goals in the region.

- When he started he said, - "Dave, I think I know how

to be Secretary of State. I could make a great deputy to you."

But he thought that he now had the hardest job in the administration.

Well, I think by many... Many metrics, he did.

I thank you for your confidence

in offering me this daunting assignment.

It's an extraordinarily moving thing

for me to return to this building again

having entered it so many years ago

as a junior Foreign Service officer.

To me, it was like reappointing him to do Bosnia.

They gave it to him because it couldn't be done.

I also have to thank Kati,

my two sons David and Anthony,

for coming down here today.

And I hope that I'll be able to see you sometime in the next few years.

He sent me a text at 12:00 midnight.

"If you're up." I said, "Yeah, I'm up."

And he said, "Well, you know, I've been offered this job."

In his own words, I was the first person he called.

He called me at 6:00 A.M.

Vali Nasr and I have never been able to determine

which one of us got the call sooner.

He created this all-star staff,

grabbing people from outside the government, inside the government.

You know, one case was like a USDA staffer

who sent him a blind email proposing how to revolutionize

agriculture in southern Afghanistan. Holbrooke hires him.

It was so typically Richard.

It was, "Okay, this is a big, thorny problem.

We need everybody inside the tent

and everybody trying to figure out how we're gonna maneuver our way forward."

I often looked at our team sort of like his chessboard.

Every one of us had a very strategic role

and we were there for a specific reason.

I was the NGO guy, and it was one of the first times

they'd ever brought in an NGO czar on a team.

He brought me in to help rethink the whole Pakistan question.

I was a point person on seeking a political settlement.

The way that he envisioned our roles

is we, the outsiders, would be bringing in a fresh lens.

The first thing he said to me

is that I want you to learn nothing here.

He thought the government was not very good

at producing fresh ideas.

He was brilliant and demanding

and extremely loyal, and petulant,

and it was all true in the course of a day,

in the course of an hour.

They wanted something different.

They needed someone to dive into a "Mission: Impossible."

And the hope was that this could be

what the Balkans was to him earlier.

- But it was so different. - It was different in every way.

And I think none of us could have possibly bargained

for just how difficult it would be.

But he, at the very least, knew the history well enough,

knew the legacy of the graveyard of empires

enough to go in, I think, knowing that in some ways it was a suicide mission.

My father had been traveling to Afghanistan since the '70s.

And exactly three years after he died,

my eldest daughter Bebe and I

went there to better understand what went wrong on his last mission.

A fourth wave of attacks is underway on Afghanistan.

Strike aircraft have been launched from their carriers

in the Arabian Sea.

I was here when the bombing started in 2001.

The Taliban collapsed very quickly and they were finished.

There was an extraordinary amount of goodwill on the part of the Afghans.

And we squandered that.

After the little golden period after the Taliban left

when everything seemed possible,

the United States failed to explain

to the Afghan people what they were doing there.

As civilian casualties became a dominant issue

and the US made no adequate explanation of why we were there,

things began to turn in an unpleasant way.

By 2006-2007, the Taliban were back in a big way

and mounted the first big offensives.

When your father came in 2009,

that's what he inherited.

He inherited at that point eight years of neglect

and of mismanagement.

This is tough work. It's the toughest job I've ever had.

There was a big gap in our military commitment

and our diplomatic commitment in Afghanistan.

If we didn't make a full press

on the diplomatic front,

we wouldn't know whether or not there could be

some kind of negotiated ending.

The military dominated everything.

Everything that we did.

And so for your dad to show up,

you know, this high-energy, brilliant, funny,

engaging diplomat who knew the region

and was just ready to, like, push everybody else out of the way,

it was just... It was really great to see.

It was like, "Wow, man, we got, like, the A-Team here again."

Tell me what you saw and heard

and did it cause you even greater concern?

Caused me to wonder about my sanity.

In the spring of 2009,

the White House ordered a comprehensive review

of US strategy in Afghanistan.

There was this big review. Are we doing the right thing?

Do we have enough resources?

Should we get out? Should we go in deeper?

I insisted on a thorough review of our strategy.

Dick was deeply involved in the deliberations starting in 2009.

I've seen a lot of these things.

This is the most thorough, the most sustained,

the most thoughtful process I have ever seen.

This review is now complete.

And as commander-in-chief, I have determined

that it is in our vital national interest

to send an additional 30,000 US troops to Afghanistan.

Your dad kept his cards

extremely close to his chest on the surge.

Everybody suspected that he had strong feelings about it,

but he never spoke in any sort of group session about...

About where he personally came out on that.

I'm not gonna get into public debates.

I'm not gonna go in that direction.

He wouldn't speak publically about his private thoughts

on US policy for Afghanistan,

but he was sharing them with a journalist.

Bob Woodward was writing a book about the war

and convinced my father to meet with him secretly.

I knew your father for 30 years.

And the deal was he would be candid.

It's all on deep background.

I can use it, but not say where it came from.

Seeing he's no longer here,

I've asked myself the question, what would he want me to do?

And you being his son, I'm sure he would want

you to have access to this material

that explains what he was thinking

and what was going on in those meetings in the White House.

We're eating.

- So... - He wasn't optimistic.

No, but he was a diplomat.

You know, you keep pushing

and, you know, eventually you may succeed.

He wasn't spending Sunday mornings over here

'cause he didn't believe in this.

But he was also a realist.

There is no magic formula in Afghanistan.

There is no date and agreement in Afghanistan.

It's going to be a long, difficult struggle.

What went wrong here and what's still wrong here,

I think your dad got that very quickly.

And really one of the central problems here

that's bedeviled this giant project from the start is Pakistan.

We said it before and let me say it again,

Afghanistan cannot be stabilized

unless Pakistan does its part.

- He's the first person. - I ever heard say

that you couldn't think about Afghanistan without Pakistan.

It was one problem. He'd call it "AfPak."

What Richard Holbrooke hoped to accomplish

was a grand bargain.

What he was thinking of was let me figure out

what would be best for the various parties in Afghanistan

and then see what Pakistan's concerns were about.

And then get all the major powers

that were involved in the region to play a role.

Pakistan's interests and American interests

run in parallel.

He was the first American diplomat to go into Pakistan

and try to establish a normal relationship,

to say, "We're not just using you to get what we want."

The American people care about the Pakistani people."

And that's what Pakistanis were dying to hear.

As my father was trying to reset the relationship with Pakistan,

his diplomatic efforts were complicated once again

by journalist David Rohde.

I'm researching this book and I make, you know,

the biggest mistake of my professional career.

I let competition and ambition get the best of me

and I go interview a Taliban commander.

He grabs me and I'm immediately taken

to the tribal areas of Pakistan.

In his first meeting

with the president of Pakistan,

your father said, "Free David Rohde,"

and Pakistani intelligence didn't lift a finger.

An American journalist kidnapped by the Taliban

is in Afghanistan and has made a daring escape.

We were held in a house near a Pakistani military base

and make it to the base while our guards are asleep.

By the time we get to Bagram and the plane lands,

I'm sort of realizing there's all these consequences.

And almost immediately there's someone saying,

"Ambassador Holbrooke is on the phone and wants to talk to you."

You know, I just...

I was so ashamed, to be blunt,

and I, you know,

I...

I'm pretty sure my first words were, "I'm so sorry."

And he... You know, he didn't...

He didn't... He was very kind.

And...

That was the beginning of months of...

my best period with him. My closest relationship.

'Cause I come back to New York

and your father spends hours and hours with me

saying, "Who are the Taliban?

What do they want? How do we negotiate with them?"

He didn't come in to manage a war.

He came in to finish this war

in a way that it would have a workable peace

that would allow us to get out.

And in his mind, we need to get to a political settlement.

That's something that Richard was advocating from the day we started.

And in the first year of office,

it was a taboo word.

- Reconciliation? - Reconciliation.

Because the mentality of the Iraq War

was that we don't talk to terrorists.

"And the military would say," If you're going to talk reconciliation,

you already are throwing in the towel."

He and I would say often you don't make peace with your friends,

and we had to be open to meeting with and talking to

and exploring with the Taliban.

But it was a constant uphill struggle.

When he would come over here on Sunday mornings,

I mean, he would be dragging.

And at the end of this process, I remember him...

I was walking him out the front door

and we're talking about this overall effort in Afghanistan,

and I just inquired what's kind of the bottom line?

And he said, "It can't work."

Testing, one, two, three, four.

Bob Woodward wasn't the only one taping my father.

Monday, August 2.

Starting these tapes,

which I should have done a long, long time ago.

Always aware of his place in history

and planning to write a memoir,

he started recording what he really thought

about US strategy in Afghanistan.

I am supporting direct talks with Taliban.

They've indicated a readiness to talk.

I'm sure they'll take a tough line at the beginning.

That's what negotiations are about.

Petraeus is strongly opposing all this.

He says he wants to do it only when the time is right,

which he says will be next year,

by which time he'll have had more military success.

Frankly, I just don't believe him.

We used to refer to each other as each other's wingman.

I was his military wingman.

I used to say that he was my diplomatic wingman.

It was very much a term of endearment, if you will,

or of respect.

The way your dad always told it

was Petraeus was his wingman.

He hated that wingman reference, didn't he?

He hated being someone else's wingman.

He was perfectly happy having his own wingmen.

He wanted to make sure that the civilians

should be dominant in this process.

I told David Axelrod

that we had been dominated much too long

by pure mil-think...

Military thinking and military domination.

And while I had great respect for the military

and Petraeus was brilliant, I liked them as individuals

and they were great Americans,

they should not dictate political strategy,

which is what's happening now.

I remember him saying to me once... he said,

"Well, the concept is that we're counterparts."

But he said the difference is... he said,

"General Petraeus has a lot of resources that I don't."

- Meaning planes and so on. - Well, there was...

There was a difference. We were delighted to give him a ride on the plane,

and ultimately we got him a plane, actually.

The military was spending

more than $2 billion a week on the war,

while my father had $300 million a year

for a civilian surge.

He spent two million of that

on this bustling campus in the middle of Kabul.

The objective that we have

is to get these students away from rote learning,

which they start in first grade.

And to question things.

This is the reading room for the students.

And we have literacy programs.

To me, what Nancy has done,

it just makes you proud to be an American.

One of our major objectives

is to promote research.

His idea of the civilian surge

to match the military surge

was exactly right.

We worked so hard

to try to not just talk about it,

but actually deliver on it.

- Thank you so much. - Okay. Thank you so much.

And I think if he were able to be here,

"he would say," Look, we made it some of the way,

but not all of the way."

It seemed another one of the challenges in this

was his relationship with President Karzai.

Well, I think Karzai was always somewhat...

reluctant around Richard.

Somewhat even suspect

of what he was trying to do.

President Karzai, who's not necessarily corrupt himself,

but the Afghan government.

It's a predatory government. It preys on its own people.

It drives people to the Taliban. It sustains the Taliban.

And I think your father understood that very quickly.

And he just went... As he was won't to do...

He went head-on into Karzai.

Ambassador Holbrooke had a vision.

The vision has not been lost sight of,

though there have been setbacks.

When he first met with President Karzai,

- he pushed. - He did.

And can you explain to me some of what happened then?

Well, there was a very strong pushback.

This is not a country where you can get anything by pushing.

There was a period of time

where President Karzai wouldn't meet with him.

Didn't trust him.

I think this situation didn't lend itself

to quite the same kind of approach

as he had engaged in in Bosnia.

He could browbeat Milosevic.

He can't browbeat an Afghan.

You can kill an Afghan with cotton,

but never with a sword.

And did he understand that?

It took him time.

This is the only country that made Richard Holbrooke

rethink his entire approach.

They didn't know what to do.

They were like, "Oh, my God."

The guy that everybody's been telling us is so great

for so long, he wears these very fashionable capes

"and is very articulate, he doesn't like our special envoy."

Now what do you do? I think if you're the president,

you know, you're faced with a choice.

You back your envoy or you don't.

In March of 2010,

the president traveled to Afghanistan,

but he left his special representative to the region

behind in Washington.

I told your dad that the president

was basically en route as he was in the air.

And I'm pretty certain

that he didn't know that it was coming.

We were working night and day on this issue

and we only found out when we saw the headlines.

I would acknowledge that Ambassador Holbrooke

made some mistakes early on.

But he recovered from that.

A senior member of President Karzai's team

"called me and said," President Karzai wants to let your boss know

that the past is the past.

"That he wants to work with him and he respects him."

So they made their position very clear.

Unfortunately, they didn't get the same message

from the administration.

Oftentimes they would come back to me in frustration

and say, "Who speaks for the US administration?

There are so many different voices.

It's unclear to us who we should be listening to."

You had an organization chart

that made no sense.

You take somebody and then you say

you're the AfPak representative,

but you only report to the Secretary of State.

It was portfolio without power.

In the middle of the day I went over to the White House

to see Tom Donilon, who was extremely agitated

and kept saying, "You're going too slow."

You don't have a strategy.

"The president's very dissatisfied."

"I said," Tom, we have a strategy.

You guys have never let us lay it out."

That, of course, got him even more agitated.

Dick and I had very intense

policy debates with each other.

We never minced words.

So, yes, there were some issues.

Tom said things like,

"I'll write my strategy myself."

An odd thing to say, because he doesn't have a strategic sense.

So what he thinks is strategy is actually political.

That really is the way the White House thinks.

They don't have a deep understanding of the issues themselves.

But increasingly, they're deluding themselves

into thinking they do.

Holbrooke walked into the apex of a trend.

Since John F. Kennedy, the White House

has taken firmer and firmer control of foreign policy.

But the highest level of White House control

is the Obama White House.

Richard had set up an interagency office

in the State Department.

Of course, no White House is going to like that

because that's supposed to be their job.

So that right away set up a conflict with Doug Lute.

Lute was a very important figure in the White House.

He kind of had the same job your father had,

but he had broader authority.

And they didn't get along.

And this again was part of the, you know,

who's in charge?

Thank you for doing this.

What a pleasure to meet you.

It's a real privilege to just

be able to reflect back on your father's contributions.

Seems to me he never really got rolling.

Did he make mistakes? Did he... what happened?

Part of it is the nature of the beast.

It's the nature of the task that he was assigned.

You know, very candidly, I'll tell you that

he had more of a free rein

under... in the Clinton administration

and perhaps expected

that same free rein under Obama.

Well, I've spoken to several people from my father's staff

who said that, actually, you were opposing him at many turns.

I even read... somebody said you were consumed

with trying to foil Holbrooke

or that you were driven by hatred.

I'm not driven by hatred by anything or anyone.

You know, look, I've read some of these same reports.

I haven't read any of those reports

that are on the record from people who would really know.

And it was a very personal experience for me.

And I'm still, to a large extent, unpacking it.

But I think the tensions became at some point

a bit personalized.

And your father was an outsize personality.

Look, he's tough to work with.

I mean, you know, I'm probably...

This probably comes as no big surprise

to anyone whose last name is Holbrooke.

He'd, you know, make his own appointment,

he'd come in, he'd close the door.

Typically put his feet up on the desk, you know?

He was confident edging on arrogance.

I mean, he knew where he was going

and no one should get in his way.

The ways he knew how to do it

were "I'm going for it, watch out for my elbows,"

and flattery.

And those two things didn't work with Obama.

Obama is a cat.

You know, he's cool.

He ran into kind of no drama.

They were very different leadership approaches

and they clashed.

And he knew that he was in the crosshairs.

You've written you saved his job more than twice.

Tell me what happened there.

Well, some of it was...

just disagreements, policy disagreements.

But there were generational and temperamental differences.

I would be in a meeting

and I would see Richard making an important point

and having his hard-won experience not understood.

It just wasn't communicated in a way

that broke through the resistance

to talking about Vietnam in 2009.

- In some of the early NSC. - Meetings with the president,

I referred to Vietnam and was told by Hillary

that the president did not want any references to Vietnam.

I was very struck by this

since I thought they were obviously relevant issues.

I was constantly interpreting for him,

translating, arguing.

It was very frustrating. It was frustrating for me to see

and frustrating for him to go through.

It stung him deeply.

It hurt him deeply.

He didn't want to talk about it

'cause it hurt him that much.

Today was a difficult day

because I woke up in the morning feeling quite uncomfortable

and realized I was back in atrial fibrillation.

Did not do the kind of work I should have done over the weekend,

but that's par for the course.

One can just feel the growing tension

and pressure in every direction.

I certainly can feel it.

He looked, you know,

like a shell of himself in those last days.

He wasn't taking care of himself.

He wasn't sleeping and he was increasingly frazzled.

I've never talked about this publically,

but in those final weeks and months,

he was constantly sending warning memos.

One of his very final memos which he gave to me

to hand-deliver to Secretary Clinton

because he no longer trusted all of the staffers.

So he would hand-deliver eyes-only memos

saying very, very bleak things about our prospects in Afghanistan

and decrying the fact that while military leaders

had the ear of the president again and again every day,

Secretary Clinton had one hour with the president each week

to cover all the topics in the world.

And so in some ways it was a practical critique

of a system he saw swinging away from the civilian side

and towards power being in the hands of the military side.

And in some ways it was a very personal critique, too,

of his own shrinking voice in the policy process,

which was very hard to see.

There wasn't a week that went by

that I didn't tell him to leave.

I didn't say get out tomorrow.

I'd say prepare a strategy for leaving.

He would say, "I can't walk out tomorrow."

I said, "For heaven's sake",

I didn't say you should walk out tomorrow.

I didn't say that at all." Then we'd argue about that.

But he'd purposefully misunderstand.

- When he knew perfectly well also... - He knew what I was saying.

And the writing was on the wall, he just didn't want to read it.

No.

No, because he was always hoping...

And this was part of his nature, too...

That tomorrow there would be a miracle

and Obama would like him and everything would be fine.

Hillary has delivered the all-important memo

to the president seeking negotiating routes out of this thing.

Finally, the president is focused on it.

Maybe we'll look back on it as one of the most important memos we ever wrote,

but that remains to be seen.

That's all for tonight.

The week that he died...

This isn't known, but it's absolutely true

and absolutely tragic...

He was trying to see the president

alone in the Oval Office

to tell him his strategy,

his plan for exiting Afghanistan.

And he couldn't get in.

The meeting with Axelrod went late,

and he was scheduled to meet with Secretary Clinton

up in her outer office.

He was running late.

He came rushing in and I was sitting on the couch,

and I'd saved the big chair for him

where he always sat when we had meetings together.

And, you know, he was saying,

"I'm so sorry. I'm sorry. First I met with the Pakistanis,

then I met with the White House."

But that was typical Richard.

It was like I'm doing a million things

and I'm trying to keep all the balls in the air.

And I was looking at him and I just saw

this deep red flush go up his face.

And I said, "Richard, what's wrong?"

And he said, "I don't know. Something's happening."

I said, "Well, you're going to the doctor right now."

I rode in the back of the ambulance with him

and we talked the whole way to the ambulance.

- I was holding his hand. - What'd you talk about?

I actually... I wrote this down

because I was... I don't think I had my BlackBerry on me.

I had this receipt from a Chinese food restaurant in my wallet.

My notes are weird.

Just amalgam of...

You know, the first one was call someone in Axelrod's office.

But then the next one was call David and have him come down.

And then Anthony and...

He said, "Tell my kids how much I love them."

Tell the staff that they're the best staff ever.

"Make sure that I don't die here."

I've got...

You said, "Make sure that I don't die here."

Yeah.

"I want to die at home.

I've got a lot left to do."

- Can I see? - Yeah.

"Eric in Axelrod's office." "David come down."

"I love so many people." "Tell Les I love him."

But that's... it was the "I love so many people"

that he kept coming back to.

"Career." This amazes me.

"Career in public service is over."

"Don't let him die here."

"Die at home with his family."

Veteran diplomat Richard Holbrooke

has died after undergoing multiple surgeries

to repair a torn aorta.

Richard Holbrooke doesn't die.

Richard Holbrooke is alive.

Richard Holbrooke is the most alive person

that any of us have ever encountered and will ever encounter.

Oh, I was thinking what a loss to the US.

What a loss to the world.

I was just undone.

I got up from the table and went to my room

and found it very difficult to see that night through.

I just don't think any of us

really could believe that he'd be gone.

I just thought here we are in a time

when the world seems to be coming apart again.

Why do we have to lose the one person

who seems to be able to put things together?

That's what I thought.

You know, I loved him.

All the things that people ever criticized him about

reminded me of people criticizing General Grant

for being a drunk and Abraham Lincoln saying,

"Find out what he drinks and give it to the other generals."

As I went around the world

working to understand my father's life and legacy,

I often thought about one of his favorite quotes,

which was from "Moby-Dick."

"I am tormented with an everlasting itch"

for things remote.

I love to sail forbidden seas

"and land on barbarous coasts."

20 years after the war, the peace my father forged

in the Balkans holds up,

tenuous, but real.

Spending time in the region,

I was surprised not to find any streets or buildings

memorializing my father.

However, there was this one spot in Kosovo named after him.

Tricky Dick's. Look at that, Bebe.

That's totally his glasses.

Look at this. Wow, he was here.

He just must have been so happy.

I like that a bar was named after him.

He feels like the last of a kind somehow.

We live in an age where diplomacy is almost a dirty word.

If you believe in diplomacy, you're somehow

kind of wonky or feeble or not tough enough.

But, no, diplomacy is the only way

that you end wars and spread peace

and give kids a future.

And your father believed in that.

He was a diplomat.

- I want to thank. - Willie Nelson,

Ambassador Richard Holbrooke,

and Bobby on rhythm guitar.

God bless America, everybody.

Good night.